Like TS Eliot said, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

We have the opportunity for wonder, awe and joy each day in our experience. We have the opportunity to live heaven on earth.

Most of us are oblivious.

The trees and flowers undergoing rebirth of the spring. The sun on our backs. The breeze on our face. The flight of a bird. The love of our pets. The joy of our spouse, our children, our family. A beautiful song. A great meal. Great conversation.

Being grateful for each miracle in our life begins the journey to gratitude.

Once we see what is really important and what true wealth is, then we are on our road not only to hope and happiness, but to living longer.

This is a choice that all of us have available.

Opening our eyes to see the beauty in our lives.

It is our choice to stop feeling like victims and embrace our power as creators.

Creating the people, places and experiences we want in our lives through conscious choice.

Our choice to trust that even feeling and seeing hate, fear and pain are opportunities to reconnect and appreciate their opposite – love, joy and safety.

For we often don’t appreciate feeling good until we feel bad. We don’t appreciate freedom until we are restricted. The duality of our lives.

Trust that every experience is an opportunity to address the fragmentation that is within each of us. An opportunity to become whole. To rise above duality.

We are all on the same river and moving to the same place.

And we are all creators, as is evidenced by the finding of wave-particle duality in quantum physics (a multi-potential wave collapses in a coherent particle when there is an observer or we take a multi-potential future state and make it a single current state by interacting with it).

Create the life you want to live. Start now. You are powerful. Embrace this reality and you will embrace health, hope and happiness.

Clay B. Marsh, MD, is West Virginia University’s chief health officer, and serves as a member of President E. Gordon Gee’s leadership team. As WVU’s vice president for health sciences, he oversees five health sciences schools and three health campuses.

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“People look for retreats for themselves, in the country, by the coast, or in the hills . . . There is nowhere that a person can find a more peaceful and trouble-free retreat than in his own mind. . . . So constantly give yourself this retreat, and renew yourself.”